Quality of service (QoS) represents a characteristic of performance in a communications network (e.g., a telephony network, a storage area network, a computer network). QoS typically takes one or more communication performance factors into account, including without packet loss, jitter, latency, error rates, bit rate, throughput, availability, reliability, etc. A network service provider can allocate resources to increase or decrease the QoS for a particular customer, network, or device. The network service provider typically incurs an increased investment of resources to provide increased levels of QoS to a customer.
Certain applications and/or activities can better accommodate a lower QoS than others. For example, when considering the aspect of QoS relating to guaranteed delay, applications executing Web surfing and bulk file transfer activities generally do not require a high QoS, whereas high definition video streaming, mission critical delay-sensitive signaling, and mission critical database access may depend on a high QoS. However, QoS is typically managed by the communications network and/or network service provider in a somewhat static manner in accordance with a service level agreement. Furthermore, a particular QoS level is broadly allocated to the computing system(s) covered by the service level agreement (e.g., all of the computers in a facility or enterprise), with a higher QoS costing more than a lower QoS.